DoCoMo's LTE Advanced promises gigabit speeds

 

DoCoMo’s Atsushi Murase: soft launch for LTE because
of lack of terminal’s

Starhub’s Peter Cook: half of traffic is still 2G, but 2G
network to close in 2015

NTT DoCoMo is planning to launch LTE services by the end of 2010, though the Japanese operator believes that it is unlikely there will be many terminals available until 2011.

The company aims to cover 50% of the Japanese population with LTE by the end of 2015, using 20,000 new base stations, mainly built as additions to current 3G base stations.

Meanwhile, Singapore mobile operator Starhub is aiming at doubling the peak speed of its HSPA+ mobile broadband network to 42 megabits a second in 2010.

Starhub, whose infrastructure is built by Huawei, has been steadily increasing its HSPA+ speeds since the service was launched in 2007 at 7.2 megabits, first to 14.4 megs and then to today’s peak of 21 megs.

NTT DoCoMo is already preparing plans for the next phase of mobile broadband, called LTE Advanced, which should allow download speeds of up to one gigabit a second, Dr Atsushi Murase, managing director of NTT DoCoMo’s research labs, told a conference in Hong Kong.

NTT DoCoMo is unwilling to use the term 4G for the first implementation of LTE, preferring to keep the term for LTE Advanced, which will be installed from 2012 or 2013 onwards.

The one gigabit speed will apply only to “low mobility” terminals, Murase told the conference, organized by Huawei for CTOs from mobile operators worldwide. For “high mobility terminals the normal maximum speed will be 100 megabits, he added.

LTE will be reserved for data services only when NTT DoCoMo launches it in late 2010, Murase explained. It will be a “soft-running type of launch” because of the lack of availability of terminals.

This is all reminiscent of the early days of GSM. Wags joked in the early 1990s GSM stood for “God send mobiles”. Coordinating the availability of new network and new terminals is always one of the biggest challenges of a generation change in the mobile industry.

When 3G was new early this decade, there was a similar problem. Handsets were large and had poor battery life. If the industry is not careful, the next generation will see a similar story.

Murase told the CTO conference in Hong Kong that expects LTE handsets to become available from 2011 onwards: DoCoMo is working with a number of terminal makers, including Fujitsu, NEC and Panasonic, he said.

However DoCoMo is concerned about the slow global rollout of LTE, which could affect the success of its own business. “We need to have other LTE operators, to ensure interoperability,” he said at the conference.

He also recalled a two-year gap in progress because of the lack of handsets after DoCoMo launched the world’s first 3G network in October 2001. “It was idling time,” he said. But now Japanese operators between them have 100 million 3G subscribers — an 85% market penetration. “Most subscribers now have 3G in Japan.”

He expects the international mobile standards body 3GPP to issue the standard for LTE Advanced by early 2011, allowing vendors and operators to work on interoperability of systems.

Murase was in no doubt about the eventual success of LTE Advanced, because of the continuing demand for faster and faster wireless broadband.

Singapore’s Starhub believes that its HSPA+ rate will be one of the fastest in the world — though Telstra in Australia is also planning to offer 42 megabits on its Ericsson-powered network in 2010.

Starhub — and Telstra — will be able to increase the speeds without significant extra capital investment, as both use base stations whose speed and characteristics are controlled by software.

That feature could delay Starhub’s launch of LTE until 2012 or 2013, said Peter Cook, vice president of the company’s mobile operations, though “there will probably be small trials before that”.

Another reason for delaying LTE is that Singapore still has a significant demand for 2G services, representing 30% of Starhub’s user base — largely migrant workers needing cheap ways to phone home or foreign visitors who are roaming onto the local network.

The software defined base stations will be able to work with 2G, 3G and LTE at the same time, but Starhub will need to manage its spectrum across the different services, said Cook. LTE, when it comes, will use spectrum more efficiently.

“We hope to get 2G off the network by 2015,” he added. “Half of our voice traffic is still 2G.”  GTB